It has since been agreed that speeches given in English will be translated into French and vice versa, and even into German and Italian when necessary. No doubt translations into Esperanto will also soon be in demand.

At four lines, with the quatrain, we reach the basic stanza form familiar from a whole range of English poetic practice. This is the length of the ballad stanza, the verse of a hymn, and innumerable other kinds of verse.

I'd probably want to teach at university, because children would drive me insane. I suspect it would be English literature, Shakespeare and so forth. I've always been deeply, deeply in love with that kind of thing.

This African American Vernacular English shares most of its grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English. But it is distinct in many ways, and it is more different from standard English than any other dialect spoken in continental North America.

Among pacifists it was above all the English who always insisted on the importance of disarmament. They said that the man in the street would not understand the kind of pacifism that neglected to demand immediate restriction of armaments.

Americans who have travelled and who have English friends know we are not necessarily all baddies, but I think that seeing us being so incessantly nasty on screen has a drip, drip, drip effect on the rest of them.

My mom has an English accent, so we always referred to the trunk as the 'boot.' And then, suddenly, we moved to Georgia and I would say things like 'open the boot' with a bit of an accent, and I quickly realized I had to adapt; that kind of thing will get you beat up!

English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.

There is something about the way that Greek poets, say Aeschylus, use metaphor that really attracts me. I don't think I can imitate it, but there's a density to it that I think I'm always trying to push towards in English.

There is a certain ancient civility about tailors that is welcome - especially in modern London, which is now very much an international city, not an English city. They're still a little vessel of Englishness in what is otherwise a pretty rambunctious place.